Review written for ClubReading.com by Susan
Old wizard pals Roger Bacon and Prospero are being threatened by a monstrous evil, and they must use their wizardly wits to escape and stay alive. With this deceptively simple premise, and without a trace of blood and gore, Bellairs takes his readers on a journey into pure nightmare. His tale is filled with slithering menace, and yet it is written with humor and charm. This book is one of those rarities that sucks you in with the first sentence and keeps its claws around your neck until the very end. Meant for young adults, though it can be enjoyed by any age group that doesn’t mind sleeping with the lights on.
EXCERPT FROM The Face in the Frost:
[The story begins…]
Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn’t matter, there was a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either. He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked into the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces; a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads, and fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass-enclosed, twisty copper-columned observatory. On the artichoke dome of the observatory was a weather vane shaped like a dancing hippopotamus; as the wind changed, it blew through the nostrils of the hippo’s hollow head, making a whiny snarfling sound that fortunately could not be heard unless you were up on the roof fixing slates.